


who put the words in your head

by endofadream



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: M/M, The trigger words fic I'm over a month late on, Trigger words, protect bucky barnes at all costs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-16
Updated: 2016-06-16
Packaged: 2018-07-15 11:56:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7221415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endofadream/pseuds/endofadream
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Your mind is blank, to be filled with Their orders. You are no one. You are the Asset. You obey.</p>
            </blockquote>





	who put the words in your head

**Longing**

Longing like the moon craves the dark to shine its silver brilliance. Yearning, deep in your belly, gripping your heart with its insistence. A feeling so deeply rooted that trying to find its beginning is impossible, like it’s been a part of you for as long as you can remember. The way dreams are, no beginning and no end, just the middle.

The way you feel when you see them, that knife-twisting stab in your gut, and you wonder if this was how Gatsby always felt staring at that green light across on Daisy’s dock. The way you’d get as a kid around Christmas, when you'd look in the storefront of Macy’s and see toys you knew wouldn’t be under the tree. Coveting is a sin, your ma insists. _It does no good to want what you can’t have, James. God gave you a healthy body, a good life._

It’s the feeling of something missing. Something vital. A limb. A heart. Something rattling loose inside you. It does no good to want what you can’t have, but that’s the whole point of longing, ain’t it?

 

**Rusted**

Sometimes your dreams are filled with the brown rust of dried blood. Sticky, congealed, smeared across skin long gone ashen with death. Rivers of it, thick, hot red choking, filling your lungs. Dripping off the shining metal of your new fingers. You imagine that the arm is rusted inside, too, that your insides are probably just as rusted. Decayed. Like an old bike left in the rain, like the one you’d found when you were ten but that Ma wouldn’t let you keep because it was a piece of junk.

You rode it anyway, gears creaking, frame bent and unsteady. Proud of what was yours, even though it could only go a coupla books before you had to stop and you always had to hide it before you got home. Even though Johnny two floors down got a brand-new bike for Hanukkah. Ownership is a prideful feeling.

You don’t own yourself anymore. Your nightmares are theirs. You _are_ a nightmare.

 

**Seventeen**

Seventeen is the winter Steve nearly dies, drawing in ragged breaths like broken glass, skin pale like the snow falling and accumulating on the fire escape outside. Like lilies, but lips still red like roses. Eyes blue like baby’s breath. Fragile.

It is Sara at her son’s bedside, rosary clutched in her frail hands, own lungs aching with sick. The crucifix dangles, swaying with her muttered prayer, the Gaelic she speaks when it’s just her and Steve and you feel like an intruder like an outsider peering through the keyhole of a life you don’t understand but when you try to leave she lifts her head and rasps out for you to _stay, please, he’d want you to_.

And, later, when Sara is asleep, you whisper _you can’t go away, ya big punk, you told me we could go to the pictures this weekend._ Disguising your sniffle in a cough and closing your eyes so he can’t see the wetness gathered along your lower lids if he opens his eyes, you try to think of who you would be without Steve Rogers. You try, but there is nothing.

 

**Daybreak**

You ship out with the birds, their bodies suspended in the pink-blue-black of the sky, silhouetted, black-ink marks against the gradient of the dawn. You are full of bravado and fear, uniform still neatly starched and pressed. Feeling fake, somehow, a child playing dress-up: a paper doll, maybe, like your sisters like, clothes folded over your one-dimensional hollow body.

Steve still asleep in the apartment because you can’t say goodbye because goodbye is forever because you’re coming back because who else will keep his stupid ass out of fights because Steve can never shut his damn trap, can he?

(You know Steve can take care of himself but that doesn't change the fact that you _want_ to.)

You meant it when you told him not to do anything stupid. Steve is recklessness wrapped up in stubbornness wrapped up in a hair-trigger temper that flares hot and bright like lightning over the sound on sultry summer nights. Sharp relentless fists and a dogged determination and a voice like thunder.

You glance back at the rooftops of a city not quite woken up from slumber. Still you don’t say goodbye. Goodbye is for those who won’t come home.

 

**Furnace**

Furnace is the heat of the HYDRA base burning around you. You staring across a flame-licked chasm at the monster who had strapped you to a table and tried to take your name. Who had tried to get you to spill national secrets while cutting you and asking you if it hurt, how are you feeling, can you feel this? It is being stared back at, calculating like the alley cats back at home when a rat scurries across their path. It is the spider-crawl shiver up your spine at eyes behind round lenses.

Before you is evil, flesh-and-blood.

It is Steve next to you, the way he’s always supposed to be. You on his left, to make up for his hearing, but then you realize that he probably doesn’t have that anymore. It is the heat as you make it across, flames snapping at your heels like a dog when the metal gives. It is the furnace in your belly when Steve tells you to go and you _cannot_ , you cannot lose him again. You will not.

_Not without you_ when what you’re really saying is _are you real?_

 

**Nine**

Nine is how old you are when you kiss a gal for the first time. Sally Walsh. Small. Pale skin, hair yellow like shining kernels of corn. Her dress is blue and her eyes are green. In your pocket is the change for penny candy that you’re itching to take over to Steve, who’s been holed up with a summer cold. You hide in an alley, the smell of cat piss and sewage all around you in the sticky-damp heat of summer, and she mashes her lips to yours. It’s over in a second, before you can even try to move your hands from where they’re at your sides. She grins when she pulls away and you think she’s real pretty but the kiss leaves you feeling hollow like bad weeks when there ain’t enough food on the table for you and your sisters so you give up most of yours.

She says thank you. You ain’t sure what to say.

 

**Benign**

You were made a weapon before They got to you. Hands trained to be still, heart trained to be cold. Rosary on the scope of a rifle but no belief in God anymore. Not when you’ve seen men with bleeding-black holes torn in their chests. God can’t exist on the scar-strewn battlefields in Europe, in the far-away gaze of a fucking kid dying in your arms. You think of what Sister Margaret would say if she could hear your thoughts. You realize that you don’t care.

You are told, sniper rifle placed in your hands, that you are doing good. That this is what war is about. But, somehow, good on the other end of a rifle seems skewed. Something poisonous hidden inside something sweet. How a tumor is still scary even when it’s benign. How all the prayer in the world can’t bring back the men you’ve dropped.

_Bless me, Father, for I have sinned…_

There is something evil lurking in you, now, and you exhale with your finger on the trigger and you don’t miss your mark.

_…It has been a lifetime since my last confession._

 

**Homecoming**

The end of the war is what most of your division talks about. Gals they gotta get home to, families they gotta see. You? You just wanna go to Coney Island with Steve and win him something nice, con him into riding a few rides. Maybe not the Cyclone this time. Ply him with sweets until he’s laughing and getting the space between your ribs with his sharp elbows. Smiling that big stupid smile of his, blond hair falling down over his forehead. Soften him up until he agrees to go dancing, gin and smoke and the loud brassy bleat of the band, two left feet but that’s okay, you got enough rhythm for the both of you, and ‘sides, it’s inevitable that you will eventually get caught up in the swish of a skirt and the heady scent of perfume and cigarettes and whiskey.

Your men all got these big homecoming plans, but you just wanna go dancing with your best pal one more time.

 

**One**

One is the last thing they manage to erase from you. They take his name from your lips and his face from your memory. They show you the headline— _Captain America crashes into Arctic: presumed dead_ —and no matter how much you scream it doesn’t change. Hope slips from your grasp to wither and die on cold cracked concrete.

You have only one real arm now.

It is only you left.

It’s easy, then. Your serial and rank begin to slip. Your name. Fantasies of Steve breaking in, saving you, faded into thin wisps of near-forgotten memory—and who is Steve, anyway? Smoke from a candle extinguished. The buzzing of halogen lights and the cold metal of the chair. Cuffs snapping closed around your wrists. A book open in the hands of the doctor in front of you, words beginning to be said.

You should have said goodbye to the rooftops after all.

 

**Freight car**

You break with this one, so fragile like the china doll in the window Becca wanted but Ma couldn’t afford. The final pieces crumbling down, pain exploding white-hot behind your closed eyelids. Sharp metal prongs in your brain, twisting meanly at the delicate meat, grabbing onto everything that is James Buchanan Barnes and ripping it out, thread by thread. Horror on Steve’s face, his hand outstretched. Whistling wind and bitter cold and the unsteady sway of metal under your palm. This one hurts the worst, this one you scream and scream and scream and scream—

_Bucky!_

With a groaning creak the metal gives and your belly swoops and suddenly you are suspended, in free-fall, like those birds at daybreak. You think about that confession you never got to go to. Cold wind whipping around your body and freezing your lungs.

And only one thought goes through your head, mouth open in a scream and hand outstretched to never grasp the one that fades and fades and fades until it is—

And you think:

_At least it was me and not Steve._

 

 

 

 

 

And then…

_Soldat?_

Mechanical. A weapon. Body is not yours, it is Theirs, just like your mind and your allegiance. They call you the American sometimes but you do not know what that means because you are a weapon and weapons do not think. They are taken apart, polished, put back together with meticulous, careful attention. They are called upon when needed, stored when they are not. They undergo painful maintenance, but that is routine.

Your mind is blank, to be filled with Their orders. You are no one. You are the Asset. You obey.

Who are you? Who were you? Through eyes as blank as your mind you look up. The voice, when it speaks, is not yours because you own nothing.

_Я готов отвечать._

**Author's Note:**

> Tumblr is [here](http://endofadream.tumblr.com) if you're into that sorta thing!


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